Barbara Migeon

Barbara Ruben Migeon (July 31, 1931 – January 14, 2023) was an American geneticist who was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Institute of Genetic Medicine. She founded the Johns Hopkins program in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology. Migeon is the author of Females are Mosaics: X inactivation and sex differences in disease. She was awarded the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Dimes/Colonel Harland D. Sanders Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.

Early life and education Barbara Ruben Migeon was born in Rochester, New York. Her parents were born to Russian immigrants, and her father was a general practitioner. During her extensive investigations into human genetics, Migeon even investigated her own chromosome, using herself as a control in her experimental investigations. She realized that her own chromosome 13 had a telomere truncation, and became aware of the likelihood of familial benign variations. She was able to clone sections of the X chromosome in the 1980s. Migeon has argued that women have an advantage over men in coping with disease and the environment owing to X-inactivation. She was at a meeting Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory shortly after her work on X-inactivation was becoming mainstream, when a group of women researchers voiced their support for the study. Migeon describes women as genetic mosaics due to their two distinctly different kinds of cells.

In 1978 Migeon founded the Johns Hopkins University PhD program in human genetics, a program she directed until 1989. Migeon disagreed with Lawrence Summers' remarks about women scientists.

Migeon served on the editorial boards of Cancer Research and the Journal of Experimental Zoology. Together they had three children, Jacques Claude, Jean-Paul and Nicole.

Awards and honors 1971 Marian Spencer Faye Board Award 2016 American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Dimes/Colonel Harland D. Sanders Lifetime Achievement Award

Selected publications Books

Journal articles